An overview of location-based services
T D’Roza and G Bilchev
This paper provides an overview of terms, technologies and standards used within the location-based services field in the
determination and presentation of the location of an entity. A description is provided of data formats and protocols for
communicating, storing and manipulating location information and some insight is given into how location information could be
used in a range of applications.
1. Introduction
A location-based service (LBS) can be described as an
application that is dependent on a certain location. Two
broad categories of LBS can be defined as triggered and
user-requested.
In a user-requested scenario, the user is retrieving the
position once and uses it on subsequent requests for
location-dependent information. This type of service
usually involves either personal location (i.e. finding where
you are) or services location (i.e. where is the nearest ...).
Examples of this type of LBS are navigation (usually
involving a map) and direction (routing information).
A triggered LBS by contrast relies on a condition set up
in advance that, once fulfilled, retrieves the position of a
given device. An example is when the user passes across
the boundaries of the cells in a mobile network. Another
example is in emergency services, where the call to the
emergency centre triggers an automatic location request
from the mobile network.
2. Positioning technology
2.1 Global positioning system (GPS)
Design of the global positioning system was begun in 1978
by the United States Department of Defense. Its original
intended use was for military positioning, navigation and
weapons aiming, but in 1984 following the crash of a
civilian Korean Airlines flight the previous year due to poor
navigational equipment, President Reagan announced that
some of the capabilities of GPS would be made available
for civilian use. In April 1995 the complete system
containing 24 operational satellites in an 11 000 nautical
mile orbit at a cost of $12bn was declared fully
operational. In the early days of civilian GPS, the signal was
intentionally scrambled through a process known as
‘selective availability’ — degrading the accuracy to around
100 metres.
20 BT Technology Journal • Vol 21 No 1 • January 2003
Only the US-DoD benefited from the true accuracy of
which GPS was capable; but at midnight on 1 May 2000
President Clinton ordered that selective availability be
turned off [1], enabling typically 3—15 m accuracy for
everyone. This decision was taken to encourage the already
growing commercial, recreational and safety applications
of GPS. Also, the possibility of GPS being used in a
malicious way against the United States was no longer
seen as a serious threat and in any case the US Military had
demonstrated the ability to implement selective
availability (SA) on a regional basis if required. The effect
of SA is shown in Fig 1. Readings were taken from a
standard GPS receiver at 30 sec intervals over a period of
24 hr at a continuously operating reference station in
Kentucky [2] on 1 May 2000 and 3 May 2000 with and
without SA respectively. Fig 1(a) shows that over time the
position appears to ‘wander’ with 95% of readings falling
within a radius of 45.0 m of the receiver’s true location.
Without SA, as shown in Fig 1(b), 95% of the points fall
within a radius of 6.3 m.
The basic principle behind GPS is that a receiver
measures the travel time of a pseudo-random code sent
from the GPS satellite to the receiver — in practice, around
0.1 sec. From this the receiver can compute the distance
(x) to the satellite which places the receiver somewhere on
the surface of an imaginary sphere centred on the satellite
with radius x (Fig 2(a)). The distance to a second satellite is
then measured, narrowing the potential locations of the
receiver to an elliptical ring at the intersection of the two
spheres (Fig 2(b)). The potential locations of the receiver
can be reduced further to just two possible points by
incorporating measurements from a third satellite
(Fig 2(c)). One of these positions is then disregarded due to
it being either too far from the Earth’s surface, or moving
at unrealistic velocity. By taking readings from a fourth
satellite, the receiver can be positioned in three-
dimensions — latitude, longitude and altitude. The
diagrams in Fig 2 show only a simplified 2-dimensional
model.

latitude, m
longitude, m
(a)
Fig 1 GPS readings taken over a 24-hour period with selective availability (a) turned on and (b) turned off [2].
X X
(a)
Fig 2 GPS position computation using (a) one satellite, (b) two satellites, (c) three satellites.
Although the basic principle is relatively simple, to
achieve the desired accuracy requires the satellites to
maintain precise orbits, which are continually monitored
and corrected. Also, each GPS satellite contains four
atomic clocks [3] synchronised to a universal time
standard. Timing information as well as ephemeris updates
— slight corrections to the satellite position table stored in
every GPS receiver — are encoded in the satellite’s signal.
A secondary benefit is that the clock in a GPS receiver
operates to atomic clock accuracy but at a fraction of the
cost of a real atomic clock.
In the maritime environment, GPS is used as the
primary source of positional data and is heavily relied upon
for emergency and distress signals. By contrast, the
aviation industry is not dependent upon GPS for its safety
critical systems, only using it as an auxiliary location
source.
2.1.1 Differential GPS (DGPS)
For most applications the accuracy of standard GPS is
ample, but there are some applications (for example
aircraft landing and manoeuvring boats in harbours) that
An overview of location-based services
latitude, m
longitude, m
(b)
X Y
Y
(b) (c)
require even greater accuracy. To satisfy this requirement,
differential GPS was developed. Differential GPS provides a
correction for errors that may have occurred in the satellite
signal due to slight delays as the signal passes through the
ionosphere and troposphere, and multipath errors.
Differential GPS comprises a network of land-based
reference stations at fixed locations on heavily surveyed
sites where a very accurate position can be determined by
means other than GPS. At these reference stations, GPS
receivers calculate the position of the site, which is then
compared to the actual known position and used to
compute an error correction factor for each satellite.
Because the GPS satellites are in such a high orbit, any
mobile GPS receivers will be using signals that have
travelled through virtually the same section of the
atmosphere and so contain virtually the same errors as the
signals received by the nearest reference station. GPS
receivers can therefore apply the same correction factors
that were computed by the reference station. Each
reference station broadcasts correction factors to
differential GPS receivers (e.g. ‘add 15 ns to the signal from
Satellite 01, 12 ns to Satellite 02’, etc) on a separate radio
network. Increasingly organisations that require this extra
BT Technology Journal • Vol 21 No 1 • January 2003 21
 An overview of location-based services
accuracy (such as the USA Coast Guard) are setting up
their own differential reference stations and broadcasting
the correction information free for public use.
2.1.2 Drawbacks of GPS
GPS offers unprecedented positional accuracy but it does
have some drawbacks. Because the satellites are in a high
orbit, and broadcasting over a large area the signal is very
weak. The pseudo-random nature of the signal allows for
small footprint antennas, but, because of the weak signal,
the receiver needs a reasonably unobstructed view of the
sky. This results in GPS receivers being unable to obtain a
position fix inside buildings, under the cover of trees, or
even when between tall buildings which restrict the view
of the sky — an effect known as the ‘urban canyon’.
2.2 GSM cellular location
Due to the cellular nature of the GSM mobile telephone
network, it is possible to determine the location of a
regular GSM mobile telephone. The basic system of cellID,
described below, is somewhat crude but techniques are
available to provide increased accuracy. This section
describes one method of increasing the accuracy of cellID,
but others also exist. The advantage of cellular positioning
over GPS is that the signal is much stronger and therefore
will operate indoors; it is also unaffected by the urban
canyon effect (subject to GSM coverage).
2.2.1 CellID
CellID is the most basic form of cellular location and works
simply by detecting the base transceiver station (BTS) with
urban
rural
(a)
Fig 3 Base transceiver station size variation (a) and sectorisation (b).
MS
LMU
BTS
(a)
Fig 4 E-OTD’s use of triangulation for a location fix is dependent upon LMUs (a) being available in adjacent cells (b).
22 BT Technology Journal • Vol 21 No 1 • January 2003
which the telephone is registered. At any moment in time
the mobile telephone/station (MS) is registered to a BTS —
this is usually the nearest BTS, but may occasionally be the
BTS of a neighbouring cell due to terrain, cell overlap or if
the nearest BTS is congested. Cells vary in size depending
on terrain and the anticipated number of users — hence in
city centres cells are much smaller than in rural locations
(Fig 3(a)). This difference in cell size greatly affects the
accuracy of a position fix since the location reported is in
fact the location of the BTS and the MS may be anywhere
within the boundary of the cell.
Typically the extent of error in urban locations may be
around 500 m, but in rural locations this can increase up to
about 15 km.
Each base-station will have multiple antennas, each
covering a sector of the cell. So a BTS with three antennas
will produce a cell with three 120o sectors. By detecting
the antenna with which the MS is registered, the location
of the MS can be narrowed down to somewhere within a
sector of the cell with the BTS at its apex (Fig 3(b)).
2.2.2 Enhanced-observed time difference (E-OTD)
E-OTD uses triangulation between BTSs to provide a more
accurate location fix. The distance of the MS from the BTS
is calculated by comparing the difference in time taken for
a control signal sent by the BTS to arrive at the MS and at a
fixed location — the location measurement unit (LMU) [4]
— where the distance to the BTS is known (Fig 4(a)).
(b)
(b)

E-OTD can improve the accuracy of standard cellID by
up to a factor of ten (Fig 4(b)). The disadvantage of E-OTD
is that it requires significant investment by the network
operator in installing the LMUs and a minor software
upgrade to the handsets to enable them to calculate the
signal delays.
3. Co-ordinate systems
Today a number of different cartesian and polar co-
ordinate systems exist including universal transverse
mercator (UTM), military grid reference system (MGRS),
and national grid systems based around a range of
reference points, units and projections used to represent
points in either two or three-dimensional space. As there is
not sufficient space within this paper to discuss them all in
detail, this section offers only a brief overview of the most
widely adopted global system — latitude, longitude and
altitude.
Latitude is a measurement of the angle at the Earth’s
centre, north or south of the equator. Longitude is a
measurement of the angle at the Earth’s centre, east or
west of the prime meridian which runs pole to pole
through Greenwich. Latitude and longitude can either be
described in decimal format, or as degrees, minutes and
seconds.
A good overview of co-ordinate systems is provided by
Dana [5].
4. Representing location in applications
The ways in which positional information can be
represented are largely dictated by the capabilities of the
viewing device. Today the most powerful device tends to
be a Web browser on a PC as it would normally have the
greatest processing power, bandwidth, and screen size. A
mobile telephone handset is perhaps the least powerful but
there are plenty of other devices to consider including
PDAs, multimedia kiosks, and digital TV. Regardless of the
positioning method employed, the raw data returned is
usually a co-ordinate, perhaps with an error parameter, for
example ‘(52 03.50N, 001 16.89E) ± 5 m’. While this is by
far the most accurate representation, to most users the
raw data is of little use and only becomes valuable when
interpreted in different ways.
(a)
Fig 5 Map data as (a) vector, (b) raster and (c) pixelated raster after resizing.
An overview of location-based services
A position can be described relative to a prior known
location in the same way that a person may describe ‘The
Red Lion pub’ as being ‘100 m from the Post Office’. A
table of geocoded points-of-interest is known as a
gazetteer, and may typically contain town and city names,
street names or business premises. For example, the co-
ordinates in the example above would be described as
‘5.046 km South West of Woodbridge, England’ when
referenced against a towns and cities gazetteer. A custom
gazetteer may also be used in some applications to
describe, for example, a company’s own offices, depots and
factories.
For many applications, including fleet management,
tracking and routing, the most logical positional
representation is graphical. There are many companies that
specialise in the provision of map data including The AA
[6], Ordnance Survey [7] and Bartholomew [8], with the
main difference being one purely of aesthetics. A map
image is usually comprised of a number of layers, where
motorways, ‘A’ roads, city labels and county borders will all
appear on separate layers. The application provider may
choose which layers to include, and will usually opt to only
include certain layers at particular zoom levels to avoid
clutter.
There is one remaining factor that will influence the
choice of map data — the choice between vector and
raster data. As the name suggests, vector data (Fig 5(a)) is
a set of instructions that describe the data in terms of
vectors and so the resulting image will scale smoothly at
different zoom levels. Raster (Fig 5(b)) data describes the
map image pixel by pixel and so the image will appear
pixelated when resized (Fig 5(c)). The choice is a trade-off
between file size and map detail — vector data consumes
less disk space and so is quicker to transfer to a remote
device but will usually contain less detail than raster data.
5. Data formats and standards
5.1 XML
The geographic information system (GIS) industry has
developed a set of XML description standard proposals.
They address the two types of geography-related
information — static (rivers, mountains, etc) and dynamic
(events, moving objects). The former information is
(b) (c)
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 An overview of location-based services
captured by the geography mark-up language (GML) and
the latter is captured by the point-of-interest exchange
(POIX) mark-up for the exchange of points of interest, the
navigation mark-up language (NVML) for the mark-up of
routes, and the SKiCAL for the mark-up of event
information.
• GML
GML [9] has been developed by the OpenGIS
Consortium (OGC) to describe geographical features.
It is part of a framework that is capable of digitally
representing the Earth. GML is based on a common
model of geography (OGC Abstract Specification)
which is accepted industry-wide. It uses a
hierarchically organised vector data model, which is
well suited to the representation of geographic data.
As expected, GML does not contain any styling
information — this is up to the application. Usually an
SVG (scalable vector graphics) can be used to
transform GML into a representation (SVG is also XML
based, so XSLT can be used to do the transformation).
The drawbacks of GML include lack of format to store
topology and no way to express co-ordinates with
more than three dimensions (for example, time can be
the fourth dimension).
• POIX
POIX [10] is an XML-based language for the
description of a position and information related only
to that position. It was designed by the Mobile
Information Standard Technical Committee. POIX is
not capable of representing additional information
such as opening times. It can, however, represent both
a fixed or a moving position — the intent being to be
able to describe a car as a point of interest as well as a
restaurant. Point-of-interest descriptions
monolithic, but it is possible to link several points
together.
• NVML
The navigation mark-up language [11] is an XML
format to represent locations as points along a route.
NVML has been developed by Fujitsu as a data
exchange format between navigation systems and to
enable route data to be used in other contexts such as
tourist information applications. NVML allows route
descriptions to be generated dynamically thus
adapting information to the path the user is actually
taking.
• SKiCAL
SKiCAL [12] is a special case of iCalendar VEVENT and
is used to describe event information. iCalendar is
used to create a format for vendor-independent
exchange of calendaring and scheduling events. It
enables users of different calendar software to book
24 BT Technology Journal • Vol 21 No 1 • January 2003
meetings and schedule events. SKiCAL extends the
iCAL by providing a machine-understandable format
for meta-information about events. It includes a
vocabulary to describe the location, time and other
relevant information about an event.
In summary, an application might use a combination of
the above XML-based formats. This can be achieved by
using XML namespaces1. It is also better to do the
processing in the application server, which will guarantee
sufficient capacity to handle generic XML processing.
Before moving on, one more point worth mentioning is
the ability to search through XML mark-up. Although using
standardised formats like GML, POIX, NVML and SKiCAL
will ensure good results, it is even better to have a
standardised way to embed meta-data information. One
proposed format for that is the Dublin Core [13], which has
been developed by the library community. The Dublin Core
has elements for the description of author, publisher and
other publication-related data, but it also includes an
element for geographic and time-related metadata.
5.2 Oracle
Oracle Spatial [14] is a component of Oracle 9i that
comprises a set of functions and procedures to enable the
storage of spatial information and allow it to be queried
and analysed quickly and efficiently in an Oracle9i
database. Spatial data represents the location of objects
and how those objects relate to each other and to the
space in which they exist.
Oracle Spatial is made up of the following components:
• a schema that prescribes the storage, syntax, and
semantics of supported geometric data types,
are
• a spatial indexing mechanism,
• a set of operators and functions for performing area-
of-interest (e.g. find nearest ...) queries, spatial join
queries, and other spatial analysis operations,
• administrative utilities.
The components and utilities provided with Oracle
Spatial facilitate the manipulation and maintenance of
geometries (the geometric representation of a shape or
shapes in some predefined co-ordinate system) in an
object-relational way, including:
• support for many geometry types, including arcs,
circles, compound polygons, compound line strings,
and optimised rectangles,
• ease-of-use in creating and maintaining indexes and in
performing spatial queries,
1 http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml-names/

• index maintenance by the Oracle 9i database server,
• geometries modelled in a single row and single
column,
• optimal performance.
6. Applications
Service providers hope that location services will stimulate
demand for wireless data services. Location information
may be used by an application provider to personalise the
service, or to improve the user interface by reducing the
need to interact with a small device while on the move
[15]. This section aims to give a brief insight into a range of
likely applications of location-based services.
6.1 Communication
Some LBS applications will be self-contained — a user
device obtains a position using one of the methods
described above, performs some processing and then
presents the resulting data back to the user. Many other
applications will require the position to be sent to a server
either for display to other parties, processing, or
referencing against additional content. Consumer
applications will often use SMS text messaging because it
is simple to use and familiar to most mobile users. The
disadvantage of SMS is that it is limited to text-based data
(although the impending multimedia messaging service
(MMS) will allow still images, audio, and video to be
transmitted). WAP may be considered as an alternative
communications channel that provides more data capacity
and reduces the end-to-end delay, although, as has been
widely reported in the press, take-up has been
disappointing and the user interface is often cumbersome.
SMS is also rather expensive as a data carrier and so may
not be cost effective for some applications, where position
reports need to be transmitted at 5-min intervals
throughout the day, for example. GPRS may be a more
appropriate bearer for some applications as only the data
transmitted will be charged for, and the high data rates
would allow for large position and telemetry logs to be
downloaded at the end of the day if required. All of the
communications channels discussed so far have relied on
the GSM network, but for safety-critical applications, or
tracking of devices in remote areas GSM may not be
appropriate. A satellite network, such as Inmarsat C or D+,
may be preferable if global coverage is required, although
there will be an obvious trade-off with cost per-position-
report, and the hardware is likely to be more bulky and
demand more power.
6.2 Fleet management
The purpose of a fleet management application is to allow
a company to keep track of its mobile assets, in near-real
time, and to be able to use that information not only to
increase performance and utilisation but also decrease
An overview of location-based services
operating costs. As an example, consider the case of a
delivery company.
By having its fleet of delivery vans reporting their
position at regular intervals throughout the day, if an
urgent collection is required, the company knows which is
the nearest van and can calculate the travel time required,
therefore optimising the distribution of tasks. If the vehicle
is also reporting telemetry data about engine performance
and driving habits (acceleration, braking, etc) the company
can also detect mechanical problems before they cause
damage, and encourage their drivers to adopt a more fuel
efficient driving behaviour. Geographic boundaries, known
as geofences, could be configured that trigger alerts when
the object being tracked crosses the geofence perimeter.
These could be defined so that when the lorry arrives
within 5 miles of the depot an alert is triggered to forewarn
the loading bay crew of the van’s arrival. Location data
could also be viewed by customers to better inform them
about the location of their deliveries and expected delivery
time.
6.3 Routing
Satellite navigation is another increasingly common
implementation of location-based services and the
benefits in terms of optimised routing, avoidance of traffic
congestion and early warning of diversions, accidents and
roadworks are easy to recognise. Users found early systems
frustrating as they did not always take account of
restrictions such as one-way systems and if incorrectly
configured may have tried to direct the driver along the
shortest route in terms of distance (which may have
involved driving through the centre of a town at rush hour),
rather than travel time. Modern systems have rectified
many of the early complaints and often allow the map
data to be updated and may also take account of traffic
congestion and variations at different times of day.
Apart from detailed turn-by-turn directions, there is
growing demand for ‘Where’s my nearest ...?’ type
applications where an end user requests the nearest
business of a particular type relative to their current
location, for example ‘Where’s my nearest Italian
restaurant?’ To date these applications have relied on self-
positioning by the user where the user has to define their
location manually either by entering a street name, town
name, postcode or some other reference. This is because
until now it has not been possible for a third party
application provider to determine the location of a user’s
mobile handset; but the imminent roll-out of APIs to the
network’s CellID data will provide a significant boost to
these services.
6.4 Safety and security
An emerging application of location-based services is in the
area of workforce safety. By equipping their workforce with
BT Technology Journal • Vol 21 No 1 • January 2003 25
 An overview of location-based services
a small electronic device that enables location
determination and transmission into a service centre, a
company can monitor the condition of lone workers and
those in high-risk areas. Status updates may be requested
at regular intervals, and the device may have a ‘panic
button’ to allow the user to request that assistance be
despatched to their precise location in the event of an
emergency.
Vehicles can now be equipped with covertly installed
tracking devices to allow their safe recovery in the event of
theft. Many of these systems are so successful that motor
insurance companies now offer discounts to the insurance
premiums of those that choose to have the relevant
devices installed.
6.5 Entertainment
The limited availability of low-cost, mass-market
positioning devices has so far been a barrier to location-
based services entering the entertainment arena — to date
specialised GPS hardware has been required. However, the
combination of the ever-decreasing price of GPS
technology, and the imminent availability of GSM CellID
positioning, has contributed to the appearance of some
innovative entertainment applications. Location-based
directory services have been around for some time using
either a WAP or SMS interface. Community-based
applications are now being launched within bars and night-
clubs that allow messaging on a person-to-person basis
within the same location. Example applications for this
type of service are DJ requests, voting, competitions, and
dating services. Many applications within the
entertainment sector will be enhanced by the MMS
applications currently being rolled out by GSM operators in
the UK.
7. Business models
This is a topic of utmost importance to the mobile
operators (MOs) who paid billions of pounds for a third-
generation licence that is yet to be used. Once the MO
knows the position of the user, it is easy to get greedy and
hence the idea to charge users for access to the positioning
information. This does not, however, build trust. Therefore,
this charging model should be applied with caution. There
are a number of ways the users could get charged for an
LBS:
• per request,
• by subscription,
• a combination of the two.
Mobile operators could also look at revenue-sharing
deals, where the users are charged for an LBS (not just for
position information) and the MO gets a cut of the
generated revenues. The MOs can also become payment
26 BT Technology Journal • Vol 21 No 1 • January 2003
aggregators and providers by using the mobile telephone
bill to charge the users for all mobile services.
A supplementary source of income can be location-
based advertising. Because the mobile telephone is very
personal, the solution might be to create even more
personalised (to user profile and user current location)
advertisements [16]. The marketing advantage of location-
based advertisements is clear — immediately measurable
success rate. Extra value-added features, such as coupons,
can be included to attract users. Advertisers could be
charged by the response rate or using the similar notion of
click-through from the Web — the number of times
information about the advertisers has been sought.
If a service provider has a sufficiently strong brand and
its services are generating a lot of traffic volume, it might
consider asking the MO to pay for generated increased
traffic. This idea, however, is largely alien to MOs,
especially if they charge users a subscription fee for access
to services rather than per-volume of traffic. That said,
however, the emergence of ‘virtual operators’ and the
downturn in the economic climate might push operators to
reconsider their business models.
8. Billing
Finally, this section considers billing mechanisms for LBS
applications. The network operators take the position that
they own the location information and hence could sell it
to providers of LBS. This also allows them to provide the
payment service and do the final billing to the users. This
model is not very much different from the NTT DoCoMo
model, where the MO charges 9 per cent of the transaction
sum. This helps the service providers in at least two ways:
• users are not required to register with each service
provider, because of the low value of each transaction
and the age of the users,
• a credit card solution might not work.
The logging of chargeable events is not very difficult.
The problem lies in getting that information into the
system where the bill is created and sent to the user.
Operators are often tied into their old big monolithic
billing systems that would require considerable effort to be
fully integrated.
Transactions are captured by customer data records
(CDRs) and recorded into a database. This can either be in
the billing database or separately. This can happen in real
time (as in the prepaid mobile accounts) or in a batch
mode (once a month for the post-paid mobile accounts).
The logic of how much to charge for each CDR could reside
either in the billing system or the application server. In the
latter case the important point is that the interfaces are
secure. How the interface works is dependent on the

architecture, but, in principle, the application server should
be able to create a record in the billing CDR database.
There is also a connection to the provisioning system,
which controls access to the available services. This could,
for example, prevent users from getting access to a service
that requires prior subscription.
MOs (especially in Europe) have recently realised the
value of becoming micro-payment service providers by
offering a payment interface to service providers (through
the use of reverse charged SMS). Although not a generic
micro-payment engine (i.e. only certain predefined charge
bands are offered), reversed charge SMS is proving to be a
popular third-party interface into the MO’s billing systems.
9. Conclusions
In the USA, the market for location-based services is being
stimulated by the E911 mandate that requires telephony
operators to be able to locate the source of emergency
calls. Phase I effectively requires CellID to be in place,
whereas Phase II requires far greater accuracy — within 50
to 100 metres in most cases [17]. The low investment
required to implement CellID has made it an attractive
value-add service for network operators resulting in the
roll-out of a system in Canada without the need for a
Government mandate. The E911 regulations have driven
the development of positioning technology which will in
turn drive LBS applications. In Europe, similar legislation
(known as E112) is being proposed by the European
Commission [18].
GSM network operators are increasingly eager to
migrate their user-base from voice-centric applications to
more profitable data applications in order to increase their
average revenue per user (ARPU), thus helping to recoup
their investment in third generation network licences and
infrastructure. Hardware costs continue to fall while device
capability increases, and though we may not yet have seen
the ‘killer application’, it may be just around the corner —
and location-based services could help us to find it.
References
1 Office of the Press Secretary, The White House — http://
www.navcen.uscg.gov/news/archive/2000/may/SA.htm
2 National Geodetic Survey — http://www.ngs.noaa.gov/FGCS/info/
sans_SA/compare/ERLA.htm
3 ‘Accuracy is addictive’, The Economist (2002) — http://www.
economist.com/science/tq/displayStory.cfm?story_id= 1020779
4 Cambridge Positioning Systems — http://www.cursor-system.com/
sitefiles/cursor/tech_eotd.htm
5 Dana P H: ‘Coordinate systems overview’, — http://
www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/coordsys/coordsys_f.html
6 The Automobile Association — http://www.theaa.com
An overview of location-based services
7 Ordnance Survey — http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk
8 Bartholomew — http://www.bartholomewmaps.com/
9 GML (Geography mark-up language) — http://opengis.net/gml/01-
029/GML2.html
10 POIX (Point-of-interest exchange language) — http://www.w3.org/
TR/poix/
11 NVML (Navigation mark-up language) — http://www.w3.org/TR/
NVML
12 SKiCAL — http://www.globecom.net/ietf/draft/draft-many-ical-ski-
03.html
13 Dublin Core — http://dublincore.org/
14 Oracle Spacial — http://download-west.oracle.com/otn/oracle9i/
901_doc/appdev.901/a88805/sdo_intr.htm
15 Basso M and Kreizman G: ‘Mobile location services for governments’,
Gartner (September 2002).
16 Bilchev G and Marston D: ‘Personalised advertising — exploiting the
distributed user profile’, BT Technol J, 21, No 1, pp 84—90 (January
2003).
17 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 911 Services (August
2002) — http://www.fcc.gov/911/enhanced/
18 GI News E112: ‘Europe states its position’, (September 2002) —
http://www.ginews.co.uk/0902_18(1).html
Thomas D’Roza joined BT at Adastral Park in
1999. He holds a Bsc (Hons) in Computer
Science, Artificial Intelligence and
Psychology from The University of
Nottingham (1999). For the past three years
he has worked in the location-based services
area of the video communications unit
within BTexact Technologies. During this
time he has worked on the Webtrack fleet
management and tracking application, and
has been involved in the development of
various GSM LBS applications from fleet
management to event tracking and
consumer SMS services.
George Bilchev joined BT in 1996. He holds a
PhD in engineering design from the
University of Plymouth and an MSc in
Artificial Intelligence from the New
Bulgarian University.
While in BT, he has been working on
mCommerce applications, personalisation,
service-oriented architectures and complex
systems research.
BT Technology Journal • Vol 21 No 1 • January 2003 27